Talks

We’re only in the early days of the rise in focus on the ‘quantified self’ (aka ‘life hacking’) where we track our daily activities and behaviours to find out more about our selves. Coupled with that, we are in the middle of the decade that some (game developers) have referred to as the ‘decade of the game’. As part of this, we are starting to see the development of apps that can create real, lasting behavioural change when they tie together the techniques that make games sticky, along with information on our behaviours and gentle ‘nudges’ to encourage us to amend behaviours.

Looking specifically at how this was applied to Quit Now: My QuitBuddy; these techniques are now being used to address pain management, recovery from surgery, addiction and increased personal control over habits. While wearables are a huge business, for most of us – the best life-tracker remains our smartphone.

One of the biggest challenges leaders and managers have is their own mindset. Comfort comes from being confident you can predict what is happening and knowing how to act. However, the modern world is a constantly changing complex paradox with uncertainty as its most salient characteristic. In this session we will explore how creative friction, a deliberate constructive disagreement approach, disrupts current mindsets and opens our thinking. We will discuss how this builds our confidence to act strategically in uncertainty and escape tactical short-termism. The outcomes of shifting mindsets using creative friction are leverage of diversity, increased creativity and generation of more successful innovation.

“Can you survive by sharing? Tales from my one month experiment in the sharing economy”

In recent years the ‘Sharing Economy’ has been hailed as both the saviour and the slayer of a modern economy. It has been purported to be a ‘new way of life’ that eschews capitalistic values for the greater good – but in a climate of billion dollar businesses – is that really the case?

In September 2015, Claire Marshall embarked on a brave, and slightly naive experiment to see if she could survive in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, using only what she could make or save using the sharing economy. It was a month of highs and lows, featuring couch-surfing nudists, fancy flats, Armenian feasts and food from dumpsters. Along the way Claire engaged in a record number of sharing economy platforms and learnt from the inside out exactly how this ‘new economy’ helps and harms us. In an engaging talk, Claire will share the trials, tears and triumphs of her month in the sharing economy. She will share the valuable lessons she learnt regarding what it means to really share, and what she sees as the future of the ‘sharing economy’.

Disruption has become a term of fashion. While overused, disruption refers to an important phenomenon; the ways in which certain new technologies bring about profound changes to markets and society, devaluing established business practices. In this talk I will show the ways in which disruption differs from innovation and change in “business as usual”. By drawing parallels between Kuhnian paradigm shifts in episodes of scientific revolutions and business disruption I will demonstrate that what changes is not merely technologies, products or business models, but more profoundly our collective understanding of what counts as customer value or product quality. It is important for business leaders to understand the nature of such disruptions if they want to react to or preempt being disrupted, because disruption puts an industry on a new trajectory.